Nokia announced today its Ovi Store is open for business and available across more than 50 Nokia devices. It’s available for an estimated 50 million Nokia devices globally. Customers can shop with their credit card or can choose to have charges added to their phone bill.
The world’s largest handset vendor said that the mobile client is available in English, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish and supports operator billing in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the UK. Although no mention was made of operator billing support in the US, Nokia did announce that AT&T plans to make Ovi Store available to its customers in the US later this year. Nokia’s forthcoming flagship device – the Nokia N97, expected to launch next month by AT&T – will have the OVI store embedded.
Content providers and application developers can sign up to distribute their content through Ovi Store by visiting publish.ovi.com. Hopefully the Ovi Store will be more successful than Nokia’s N-Gage and ‘Comes with Music’ ventures.
The Nokia Ovi Store Launch Is A Complete Disaster, writes Robin Wauters in TechCrunch, with slow website performance initially. Nevertheless, TechCrunch browsed the online store and hand-picked the following 10 applications they think you should install first:
- * Qik (Photo & video, free) – Ovi Store listing: a powerful way to share live video from your mobile phone with friends everywhere you go.
- * FlyScreen (News & Info, free)- Ovi Store listing: an application that lets you add your favorite web services (in widget form) to your phone’s sleep screen, enabling zero-click access to the content you use most.
- * Photobucket (Photo & video) – Ovi Store listing: lets you log in to your Photobucket account, upload photos from your phone to your album and search its public repository of photos.
- * Flight Info (News & Info, free) – Ovi Store listing: key in any airline code and flight number and track terminal, departing and arrival information.
- * Assassin’s Creed (Games) – Ovi Store listing: end the Third Crusade from your mobile phone. Update: seems to have disappeared from the store somehow. Alternative: Wolverine (€5).
- * Twittix (Social Networks, €1) – Ovi Store listing: Yup, it’s a mobile client for Twitter.
- * MobiSystems OfficeSuite 5 (Business, €20) – Ovi Store listing: OfficeSuite is a complete mobile office solution, allowing you to create, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files away from your office. Support MS Office 2007 files.
- * RISK (Games, €5) – Ovi Store listing: Enjoy the classic board game playing against up to five cunning computer opponents, each with distinctive tactics and unique levels of aggression.
- * AP News (News & Info, free) – Ovi Store listing: Yes, we know, it’s AP, but this app does give you a good overview of breaking news and photo galleries to boot.
- * World Traveler (Utilities) – Ovi Store listing: allows travelers to plan and manage journey activities and provides instant access to relevant information and services. Update: seems to have disappeared from the store somehow. Alternative: WorldMate 2009 (free).
Apple’s App Store is the one to beat, of course. It currently offers 40,000 apps and has recorded over 1 billion downloads. Still, Nokia has a reported catalogue of over 20,000 items, with “thousands of the content industry’s biggest names along with independent application developers are distributing their media, applications and games through Ovi Store.”
Smartphone sales represented 13.5 per cent of all mobile device sales in the first quarter of 2009, compared with 11 per cent in the first quarter of 2008. The newest data from Gartner shows that Apple’s share of worldwide smartphone sales grew from 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 10.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Research In Motion saw its BlackBerry market share rise from 13.3 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 19.9 percent in 2009, with unit sales growing from 4.3 million to 7.2 million over the same period.
The iPhone App Store, Android Market, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Palm App Catalog and Nokia Ovi Store are opening new frontiers.
They provide a platform for marketing, selling and distributing software; all a developer needs to provide is a good idea and some working code. The Guardian explains how.
Nearly 162 million smartphones were sold last year, surpassing laptop sales for the first time, according to Informa. Gartner says there were 139.3 million smartphone sales in 2008, up 14% compared to 2007.
Informa predicts smartphone penetration of 13.5 percent this year, reaching 38 percent by 2013. Last year, just under half of smartphones sold were based on Symbian — a drop of 16 percentage points from the year before.
In the US, the market share is heavily skewed towards the iPhone.
